Rainelle (Images of America)

Most of the lumber camps that harvested 8.5 million acres of West Virginia’s virgin forest had faded into history when John Raine built Rainelle in the Meadow River basin in 1909. By recruiting workers of high morale and character, many of them highly skilled, Rainelle became noted as “the best hardwood sawmill town in the country” and “a town built to carry on.” Through vintage photographs, Rainelle shares stories of the four generations who built and operated a prosperous Meadow River Lumber Company for 60 years, using the entire tree “from bark to bird’s nest,” and their descendants who continue building the town decades after the mill’s closing. Rainelle captures founders and lumber workers, preachers and physicians, war heroes and athletes, businesses and churches, schools and recreation, as well as that spice of West Virginia life, politics and government.